If you feel like you've been hearing about Beck's new album everywhere lately, you probably have. Like most major-label hits, Guero's ubiquity is the result of a carefully calibrated PR campaign that began long before the CD's street date. But Beck and his label, Interscope, went way beyond the norm, supplementing the usual onslaught of TV, radio, and print marketing with a cross-platform blitz of iTunes exclusives, downloadable videos, and releases catering to digital consumers. This includes a deluxe CD/DVD-Audio package featuring a 5.1-surround mix and visuals you can control with your DVD player's remote.
For Beck - the grandson of 1960s Fluxus artist Al Hansen, who advocated intermedia collaboration - jamming with animators and videographers comes naturally. "It's an interesting time in the music business, with videogames becoming more culturally dominant than albums," he observes. "When a new game comes out, it's this coveted object, the way a Stones or a Beatles record was back in the day. Guero is a real early step in a direction with a lot of possibilities."
The strategy has proven an artistic and a commercial success. Within a week of Guero's release in March, it jumped to number one on Amazon and iTunes, despite the fact that an early version of the album had been leaked online months earlier. Meanwhile, its first single, "E-Pro," reached the top spot on Billboard's modern rock chart - the first Beck song to get so much airplay since the 1994 breakout track "Loser."
How a Digital Player Beats His Own Drum
Beck put three new music videos on the Net months before Guero's release. The idea for director Adam Levite's ASCII-animated clip for the song "Black Tambourine" grew out of one of Beck's art projects. "I got a digital point-and-shoot camera that does 15-second movies, found a program to transfer each frame into ASCII, and my friend stuck the frames into iMovie," Beck explains.
GameBoy Variations, a collection of remixes released on iTunes two months prior to Guero, augments the instrumentation of four album tracks with old-school arcade bleeps from Nintendo jammers 8-Bit and Paza. "The low-fi scene of people hacking old electronics to make music is definitely aligned with my aesthetic," Beck says.
Beck hired artists at D-Fuse in the UK to design more than 100 videostreams for the double-disc CD/DVD-Audio version of Guero. "Beck can imagine creative processes quite far down the line, like a game of chess," says D-Fuse's Michael Faulkner. "He's thinking 100 things at once."
- Steve Silberman
Beck
credit Autumn de Wilde
PLAY
Beck's Buzz Machine
